Last Sunday, a few friends and I took a caving trip to a place outside the town of Huntington, PA, a town that I could have been living in right now if life circumstance had not made me decide on nearby State College instead. Huntington: a quintessential Central Pennsylvania small town, complete with a bar, prison, and the river that obliviously winds by both. However, we weren't interested in drowning streamers or sorrows. The thing that piqued our interest above all else was the network of limestone caverns that slithered beneath.
Upon the first arrival at the meet-up location, my friend Ethan and I got out of the car and explored around for the 40 minutes it took for the rest of the crew to arrive. Cavers, I've discovered, can be a joyous, unapologetic, perpetually late people. They've even coined the moniker "caver-time" to describe it. This suffix seems to be utilized by many groups of people who are the last to arrive and linger on past the edge of welcome. From my Telenganan friend using the phrase "Indian-time" to describe his failure to appear at the proper time for our mutual friend's grad party to my former-partner's Jewish grandparents describing to me the concept of "Jewish-time," everyone seems to monopolize their tardiness. God bless the perpetually late!
Anyways, Ethan and I explored around the ridgeline of the cave entrance, running past an un-named creek and a once named abandoned barn, full of un-named wasps that buzzed with anger every time we drew near. We called their bluff. The herps were wary, as a painted turtle and a ringneck snake both fled upon seeing us. We found the skeleton of a deer, most likely a three-four year old doe based on the teeth, lying in the abandoned barn, her bones chiseled by years of dust and dirt and wasps.
Soon thereafter, the rest of our motley crew arrived and we suited up our coveralls and helmets and flashlights. By the time we walked up the ridge in all our gear, I was already sweating in the hot spring sunshine and anticipating getting into the cool darkness of the cave. PA caves all stay around 55-60 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. The black relief was as comfortable as expected. However, upon our first descent, Carmen, one of the people on the trip, noticed that on the ceiling of the first narrow crawlway, were several small brown bats.
Up here in the North-East, we're getting to the end of bat hibernation season. Yet, there's still a few that linger on in their drowsy like states, not wanting to venture out beyond the rocks that they call home. Bats are one of the most under-appreciated components in our ecosystem as pollinators and insectivores, and bat populations have been recently ravaged due to diseases such as White-Nose-Syndrome. Needless to say, we didn't want to disturb them, so the lights were dimmed, voices ceased, and we slowly crawled around their small, furry, hanging forms, vividly alive in the twilight of the shadows, on the muddy limestone below.
After we skirted the bat passage, we found ourselves opened up to the Potato Room, a wide, stalag-ful room named for the formation in the center that bears it's resemblance to the beloved spud. A small but constant torrent of water dripped from a stalactite made it shimmer and glow in the reflection of our headlamps. On the ceilings of the Potato Room were a series of vermiculations, swiggle-patterns in the cave wall. The formation of vermiculations are a mystery that has puzzled cave scientists for many years, and debate still rages on based on whether they form from biota or have no biological origin. Just one of many questions yet to be answered about the underground. Perhaps the same force that created vermiculations in cave walls created them on the backs of tiger trout, or behind the bark of an old oak tree. Perhaps not.
When I was little, I used to go to bed by spreading out my blanket, lying down on one end, and rolling myself up like one of my uncle's cigarettes. There, I would sit, snug as a bug, unable to move and with no desire to. Then, one night, I suddenly had this dream that I was a caterpillar trapped in a cocoon, the breath slowly becoming constricted out of my body. In reality, I was just facedown in my bundle, but when I was finally able to wake up, I immediately rolled myself back out. From that day forward, I became terrified of closed spaces. Caving has dissipated that fear back far into my locuses.
Going caving wasn't anywhere near my radar when I got to State College. When I was approached by a guy I now know by name in coveralls and a full vertical-gear set for recruiting, I was merely interested, nothing more. By the end of the week, I was in Tytoona cave preserve. I loved the formations, squeezing through narrow passages to get to open rooms, and found myself enjoying being enveloped in the cool darkness. I'm a very avid night fisherman on the walleye scene back home, always welcoming the chance to slink around in the dark, unseen, unheard. In a cave, your relation with the absence of light becomes far more intimate; you can see true darkness that many go their entire lives without.
And so we crawled. Past the formations, through squeezes, through a room called "The Cheese Room" because of a past caver who had attempted to age dairy products in it.
After the Cheese Room, we got to Water World, a name that conjures images of happy children at play in a neon, blazing, sun-lit water park. In reality, Water World was a cold and wet crawl underneath a rock, required a 90 degree turn with your head half submerged in cave muck. I managed to squeeze through without too much difficulty, and emerged from the other side shivering and dirty but very much breathing.
As soon as the entire crew got through Water World, we sprint-crawled through and out the rest of the cave, skirting a section known as "The Maze," leaving a reason to return. Basking in the warmth of the sunshine outside, washing our mud-soaked coveralls in the creek, falling asleep in the car on the way back. God damn, is it summer yet?
